Big before the Beatles

LULLABY OF BIRDLAND: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE SHEARING by George Shearing with Alyn Shipton (Continuum Books, £18.99)

Until the Beatles came along and changed the rules, the most successful British-born popular musician in America was almost certainly George Shearing.

Building on a phenomenal hit single, September In The Rain, which sold 900,000 copies after release in 1949, he kept his band in well-paid work in glamorous nightspots in New York, Chicago, Las Vegas and Hollywood for an astounding 29 years.

The distinctive sound of the Shearing Quintet, George's piano combining with vibraphone and guitar over the support of bass and drums, arose out of blending techniques from the Glenn Miller band and a rumbustious pianist called Milt Buckner.

The overall impression was seductively gentle, yet the underlying musical idiom was tough and modern: without scaring the customers, the quintet incorporated the revolution led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Shearing heard them at Birdland, the New York club which inspired his song and the title of this book, when he launched himself into an American career after World War II. He had already reached the top level of British jazz musicians, after being born blind in Battersea, London, the youngest of nine children. His father was a coalman, and his mother made ends meet by cleaning railway carriages at night.

He describes how he was taught the piano, and how he learned new pieces by painstakingly, memorising Braille scores bit by bit, a method which may account for his phenomenal memory: during one of his visits to London some years ago, when the subject of the 'Cockney Alphabet' came up around a crowded table where we were both guests, he sprang to the challenge and recited: ' Ay for 'orses, Beef or mutton, Seaforth 'Ighlanders . . .' faultlessly to the end.

The fact that he could recall an ancient joke going back to the 1920s is an expression of his love of boyish word-play and his engaging personality, both of which come out in this autobiography, constructed with the knowledgeable aid of the author and broadcaster Alyn Shipton.

Shearing, 85 in August and still working, details the extraordinary difficulties faced by an entertainer constantly on the move from city to city in a world he cannot see.

But he does not complain: his blindness is a fact of his life, and sometimes part of his act. For many years he made a best-selling series of mood LPs, with distinctive covers featuring glamorous models in slinky gowns draped provocatively over a piano. 'I used to kid audiences that because I was fortunate enough to read Braille, I'd chosen them myself,' he writes, 'and it often took quite a time for the penny to drop.'